Top insurance brokers, No. 8: Alliant Insurance Services Inc.

2023 brokerage revenue: $3.86B
Percent increase: 20.8%

Alliant Insurance Services Inc. expanded its range of specialist businesses in 2023 by purchasing health care brokers and launching its reinsurance brokerage division.

The brokerage made several other deals and continued to aggressively hire experienced brokers and well-established teams from across the industry.

The various efforts helped it report another year of more than 20% revenue growth.

The company also made some executive changes. In January, Greg Zimmer, its longtime president and chief financial officer, was named CEO, taking over the position from Tom Corbett, who moved to executive chairman.

Alliant reported brokerage revenue of $3.86 billion last year, a 20.8% increase over 2022. The brokerage moved up one position to No. 8 in Business Insurance’s ranking of the world’s largest brokerages.

While Alliant made about 20 acquisitions over the past year, more than two-thirds of the revenue growth was organic, Mr. Zimmer said.

Alliant is mainly focused on specialty lines, and the construction, energy and real estate sectors have helped propel growth over the past year, Mr. Zimmer said.

Alliant remains well-positioned in the market in large part because of its long-time focus on specialties, its consistent private-equity support, its attractive employee-equity program and a diversified book of business, said John Wepler, chairman and CEO of Woodmere, Ohio-based Marsh, Berry & Co. Inc. 

“They’re flirting with what we call the perfect score, the ‘rule of 50,’ that’s 35% (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) margin and 15% organic growth,” he said. “Extremely strong organic growth and a strong margin is a discipline that very few have.”

“They have a more specialty-oriented book that, in general, they’ve been successful in generating a lot of new business from,” said Julie Herman, a New York-based director at S&P Global Ratings, a division of S&P Global Inc.

Alliant grew strongly in its managing general agency business, she said. In addition, its personal auto book, which had been a drag over the past few years, was turned around, she said. 

Ms. Herman said Alliant has also benefited from its strategy of hiring teams of producers rather than purchasing numerous smaller brokers.

“That’s been successful for them and a big growth contributor as well,” she said. 

Over the years, the strategy has also led to numerous lawsuits against Alliant and some of the brokers it hired by rivals alleging breach of nonsolicitation agreements. Many of the lawsuits are settled. 

Several of the acquisitions Alliant made over the past year enabled the brokerage to enter the Affordable Care Act-related insurance sector, Mr. Zimmer said.

“We made a number of acquisitions within the ACA space, which have done unbelievably well,” he said.

Alliant also formed a reinsurance brokerage last year. 

“We see it as a growing market for a variety of reasons, one of which is simply looking internally at our current business and determining where we can act as the reinsurance broker,” he said.

Alliant Re focuses on facultative reinsurance rather than the larger treaty reinsurance market.

Treaty reinsurance “requires a larger platform than what we have in place today, so it’s not to say that we won’t be investing in that platform,” he said. “As we sit here today, what we have on our plate is more than filling our time.”

Alliant announced the new division in April 2023 and reported about $8.5 million in reinsurance brokerage revenue last year.

The vast majority of Alliant’s clients are based in the United States, and it handles international placements primarily through relationships with other brokers. 

“There is no direct line of sight, at least at this stage, in terms of having boots on the ground on an international basis,” Mr. Zimmer said.

With the appointment of Mr. Zimmer as CEO, the brokerage made several related promotions, including naming Ralph Hurst president; Peter Arkley president, national brokerage; and Sean McConlogue, president of Alliant Underwriting and Consumer Solutions. 

Mr. Wepler said that the changes at the top should not lead to any significant changes at Alliant because Mr. Zimmer and Mr. Corbett have been working together for more than 25 years.

“It’s more of the same in a good way,” he said.